By columnist Dennis McCarthy in the Los Angeles Daily News:

The Los Angeles Unified School District has cancelled its summer classes for adults with developmental disabilities for the first time in 20 years, thanks to the budget crisis. Veteran special ed teacher Robert Zazula, who will be laid off for the summer as a result of the cuts, is angry that his students won’t be served even as English-as-second-language classes are preserved.

An excerpt from McCarthy’s interview with Zazula:

“My people matter, and for anyone to say they don’t, whatever the reason, is wrong,” the Bronx, N.Y.-born teacher says.

“These people were born into a world where they are not as fortunate as the rest of us. They need our continued support. Now that there’s a budget crisis we’re going to forget about them?”

… “Why ESL classes all year and not the disabled? We don’t matter anymore?”

Rick Santorum, former Republican senator from Pennsylvania and Fox News contributor, celebrates his daughter’s second birthday with an op-ed in the Philadelphia Inquirer. Isabella has Trisomy 18, and has survived despite the dire predictions of doctors and experts. Santorum says Bella’s life may not be long, but “she is worth every tear.” An excerpt:

Being the parent of a special child gives one exceptional insight into the negative perception of the disabled among many medical professionals, particularly when they see your child as having an intellectual disability. Sadly, we discovered that not only did we have to search for doctors who had experience with trisomy 18. We also had to search for those who saw Bella not as a fatal diagnosis, but as a wanted and loved daughter and sister, as well as a beautiful gift from God.

… Living with Bella has been a course in character and virtue. She makes us better. And it’s not just our family; she enriches every life she touches. In the end, isn’t that what every parent hopes for his or her child?

Writing in the [UK] Sunday Times, columnist India Knight hails a mother of a 5-year-old with Down syndrome who challenged Scottish standup comedian Frankie Boyle over a comedy routine. Boyle, who is known for his crude humor, referred to “Mongoloids” who have bowl haircuts and are “destined for an early death”. He recently piloted a television show in Britain called “Deal with this, Retards.”

Boyle, Knight says,

… isn’t even enough of a man to offer up an apology. Sharon Smith, on the other hand, is a heroine – for standing up for her daughter and, by extension, for the growing number of children with Down’s, for pointing out to Mr Hilarious that the verbal equivalent of kicking the spastic around the playground won’t do any more.

See also:

• Making light of disability — BBC
• Frankie Boyle criticized for Down syndrome jokes — BBC

Columnist Dan Kennedy, writing in the [UK] Guardian, says the health care bill liberates tens of millions of Americans like his daughter who have what insurance companies call pre-existing conditions. Kennedy’s 17-year-old daughter Becky was diagnosed at birth with achondroplasia, a genetic condition that is the most common form of dwarfism.

The bill, he writes, will prohibit insurance companies from denying benefits to people with pre-existing conditions. The effect of those regulations, Kennedy says, will be to “release … pent-up entrepreneurialism,” allowing people to launch businesses or join start-up companies without fear of losing their insurance coverage. An excerpt:

Maybe an accountant who’s recovered from cancer wants to try his hand at consulting. Maybe a mother with an autistic child has a killer idea for a restaurant. Maybe a wheelchair-using lawyer at a large firm would like to hang out her own shingle. Now there’s nothing to stop them.

Related column by Dan Kennedy: Wiping out human variation. Kennedy worries that a new test allowing people to see if they have “preventable genetic diseases” encourages the elimination of human diversity. An excerpt:

… what if we had been told we were at risk of having a child with a “preventable genetic disease”? What would we have done? I’d like to think the answer would have been “nothing”, but who knows? In 1992, we could at least feel secure in the knowledge that there wasn’t anything to be done.

In 2010, and in the years and decades to come, we will not only be able to do something, but I fear we will be expected to do something as well. It’s a chilling prospect, and one we haven’t even begun to talk about. The time to start talking is now.

Dan Kennedy is an assistant professor of journalism at Northeastern University in Boston.

Editorial writers at the Wall Street Journal hail the recent court rulings that dismiss allegations of a link between vaccines and autism in children. An excerpt:

The rulings follow the same court’s judgment last year against claims that measles-mumps-rubella shots in combination with other thimerosal-containing vaccines cause autism. And they reinforce many comprehensive scientific studies, including one from the Institute of Medicine, that have ruled out any causal link.

Autism is a frightening diagnosis that puts enormous burdens on families, but blaming vaccines without evidence only harms other families who might be frightened enough not to immunize their children. The fate of children with autism would be far better served if the activists who have devoted their resources to lawsuits would support research to discover its true causes, and to helping those children realize their full human potential.

Vancouver Sun columnist Miro Cernetig reacts to the decision by CTV not to broadcast the opening ceremonies of the Paralympic Games across Canada. The Canadian television network subsequently reversed itself and broadcast the ceremonies, but only in British Columbia.

Cernetig urges network executives to “rectify their unfortunate slight of the world’s Paralympians” by broadcasting the closing ceremony. Excerpts follow:

If the job is to shoot yourself in the foot, look hard-hearted and show you don’t quite get the true spirit of the Olympics, CTV’s bean-counters take the gold.

… We don’t put the Olympic cauldron on half-burn for Paralympians.

Nobody is pretending the Paralympics is a TV mega-event on the scale of the Olympics. There are no celebrity Paralympians raking in the millions or pro athletes dipping their toes into amateur sport to go for the gold.

But when it comes to stories of human tenacity, athleticism and sheer grit, most of us agree the Paralympians deserved — even for a half-hour of prime time — the national spotlight as they marched into BC Place.

Some video coverage of the Paralympic Games can be found at Paralympic Sport TV here.

(Reuters photo of the opening ceremony from the Vancouver Sun)

New York Times columnist Nicholas D. Kristof examines the question of whether chemicals in the environment may be partly to blame for the proliferation of autism diagnoses across the country. He cites an article by Philip J. Landrigan, just posted online in the peer-reviewed journal Current Opinion in Pediatrics, that says the “likelihood is high” that many environmental chemicals “have potential to cause injury to the developing brain and to produce neurodevelopmental disorders.”

An excerpt:

Frankly, these are difficult issues for journalists to write about. Evidence is technical, fragmentary and conflicting, and there’s a danger of sensationalizing risks. Publicity about fears that vaccinations cause autism – a theory that has now been discredited – perhaps had the catastrophic consequence of lowering vaccination rates in America.

On the other hand, in the case of great health dangers of modern times – mercury, lead, tobacco, asbestos – journalists were too slow to blow the whistle. In public health, we in the press have more often been lap dogs than watchdogs.

At a time when many Americans still use plastic containers to microwave food, in ways that make toxicologists blanch, we need accelerated research, regulation and consumer protection.